Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [42]
On the following Monday morning, we compared notes about our experiences getting home on Friday. I had given up waiting for the bus and walked most of the way home: it had taken Graham nearly an hour and Clive an hour and a half to complete their relatively short journeys. It was Ed, though, who had a real tale of woe to tell. He came in late, looking strained, and over coffee told us what had happened. ‘I got on to the motorway hoping that would be the easiest and quickest way, but how wrong was I! The traffic ground to a halt on all lanes within about a mile. Then it literally just crawled along for about an hour and a half. I heard on the radio that they had closed the M50, so I had to get off at the next turn-off, which took another thirty minutes. Only trouble was, it was the turn-off for Tewkesbury, which was the last place I wanted to go.
‘I managed to avoid going into the town centre and struck off cross-country, coming across stretches of the road that were flooded and sometimes risking going through them, sometimes trying to find a route around them. It took another two hours but eventually I made it within five miles of home, but that was it. The only road was deeply flooded for a stretch of twenty yards; there was no way I was going to manage to drive through it. I couldn’t even leave the car and strike out on foot.
‘Larger lorries seemed to be able to get through, though, so I had a brainwave and hitched a ride on an oil-tanker that was in the queue. Only trouble was, just as we were about to go through, the lorry in front got stuck so my driver decided that he was spending the night in his cab.
‘It looked as though I was going to have to get what sleep I could back in my car. I rang Anne to tell her the news, but then she had a brainwave. We have some friends who live on this side of the flooding. I rang them and thank goodness they were in. They made me very welcome – cooked me a meal, poured wine and beer down my throat and then gave me a bed for the night.’
‘Better than a night in the car, then,’ said Graham.
Ed nodded enthusiastically. ‘I woke up at seven the next morning, dressed and left without waking them, hoping that some of the flooding had gone down. I managed to get nearly all the way home, driving through countryside that looked like there’d been a nuclear strike with abandoned cars by the road, and mud and rubble all over the place.
‘The really, really irritating thing was that I was two hundred yards from my house when I finally misjudged the depth of a stretch of flooding; I managed to get through it but it was touch and go, and when I reached the other side, the engine conked out.’
Clive asked, ‘Water in the air intake?’
‘Luckily, no. The RAC came out and said that it hadn’t got past the air filter. I dried that out and it seems to be running OK.’
‘You were bloody lucky,’ was Graham’s view of this.
Ed said nothing, but his face suggested that he was less than convinced.
TWENTY-THREE
The first casualties of the flooding were brought in two days later. Two men had been in a cellar using a diesel pump to lower the water level but had not thought about the lack of ventilation in such an enclosed space. They had both been overcome by fumes and, as post-mortem examination showed, had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. After that, though, it all went quiet and we in the mortuary thought that we had avoided the worst of the cost of the floods. But then the Reverend Ken Samuelson died on the Intensive Therapy Unit at the hospital and nobody knew why. The E60 from the Coroner’s office, though, told us that he had lived in Tewkesbury and, on the night of the worst of the flooding, he had repeatedly dived into the basement of his house to retrieve his collection of expensive porcelain. He had been submerged for quite a long time in total, but had been rescued by the fire service and taken to hospital. After a full